Britain After Coronavirus: Birmingham and How We Recovered And
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14 September 2020 Britain After Coronavirus: Birmingham And How We Recovered and Rebalanced ‘Last Time’ Did central economic planning sabotage postwar Birmingham's recovery - and might its history and 21st century revival have lessons for Britain's post-pandemic recovery – and help us find our bearings? By Julian Dee 0 Britain After Coronavirus: Birmingham And How We Recovered and Rebalanced ‘Last Time’ Cover Image: ‘A Birds Eye View of Birmingham, 1886’ HW Brewer, focusing on Chamberlain Square. Left foreground: roofs of Liberal Club (demolished 1965) and Mason Science College (later part of Birmingham University - demolished 1964); centre foreground: Chamberlain Memorial and smaller Dawson Memorial; right foreground: Reference Library (demolished 1974); mid-centre: ‘Big Brum’ clock tower of Museum & Art Gallery and dome of Council House; centre-right: Town Hall; right background: Christ Church on Victoria Square (church demolished 1899) and New Street Station. (Picture: Wikipedia, Public Domain) Note to readers: To keep your place in the essay, open links in a new tab. To do this: On a PC - hold the 'ctrl' key down when you click on the link On a Mac - hold the 'command' key down when you click on the link 1 Britain After Coronavirus: Birmingham And How We Recovered and Rebalanced ‘Last Time’ 1 Global Birmingham – ‘The Workshop of The World’ and ‘The Best Governed City in the World’. I have never talked to anyone about Birmingham’s 20th century postwar decline before I have first told them about the 21st century revival I have witnessed – and what I’ve learnt to date about its history, since moving here from London in 2016. While exploring our new city, my wife and kids found inscribed in Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, historian William Hutton’s description of his 1741 first visit to Birmingham: “I was surprised at the place, but more so at the people. They were a species I had never seen. They possessed a vivacity I had never beheld. I had been among dreamers, but now I saw men awake. Their very step along the street showed alacrity…” The British cities of Birmingham and Manchester have strong claims to being metropolitan birthplaces of the global industrial revolution. Widespread recognition today of Birmingham’s pioneering industrialisation comes in the form, for example, of the city’s 18th century steam engine pioneers Boulton & Watt, who have had their own £50 note - and the unit of power named after Watt. In Birmingham was built Britain’s first monumental town hall. Modeled on the Temple of Castor & Pollux, seat of the Roman Senate, it opened in 1834 – just a week before the old and neglected Houses of Parliament burnt down. Here, regular visitor Felix Mendelssohn premiered his Elijah oratorio - and Dickens gave readings of A Christmas Carol - while everyone from Queen Victoria to the Shah of Persia visited and celebrated the city. The business acumen of Birmingham’s city council famously inspired Julian Ralph in 1890 to describe it in New York’s Harper’s Magazine as ‘the best-governed city in the world’. Historian and Crossbench Peer Lord Asa Briggs (1921- 2016) gave us many examples as to why, from Joseph Chamberlain’s 1873 – 2 Britain After Coronavirus: Birmingham And How We Recovered and Rebalanced ‘Last Time’ 1876 mayoralty. His municipalisation of the gas works, for example, not only resulted in modernisation of, and better working conditions in, the gas works - but also lower local taxes, cheaper gas for Birmingham’s citizens and subsidies for public improvement projects and the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery. To his admirers, Chamberlain brought widespread interest to the rather serious business of local authority finance. Lord Briggs relayed that after a Birmingham Mail reporter listened to the Gas Committee’s annual presentation of its stunning 1881 statistical surpluses, he wrote that it was: ‘a sound…which is musical, and a sound which is captivating’. Perhaps it is not a surprise that in our straightened times, our previous Prime Minister and her chief of staff, are such fans of Joseph Chamberlain. As recently as 1959, British Pathé described Birmingham as a ‘city of elegant squares and impressive buildings – a city of space and prosperity’. This was sadly, not a narrative of postwar Birmingham that many people of my generation would have recognised when growing up in the late twentieth century. But it was still the case for a time after world war two that what had been called the best-governed city in the world was also famed, with its West Midlands city region, as ‘The Workshop of the World’ – and as ‘The City of a Thousand Trades’. So more perspective on this global pioneer city’s later and former postwar decline is relevant today to policymakers - and placemakers all around the world. This is more especially the case as nations plan their post-pandemic recoveries from what represents the biggest economic upheaval since the world wars. Birmingham’s postwar experience might caution us to try and gauge in this context at what point the ‘peacetime’ retention and adaptation of centralised ‘wartime’ powers by national governments may eventually become a counterproductive pitfall, capping the dynamism and disconnecting the million-and-one relationships, businesses and organisations that make our cities and towns thrive. It was a chance conversation with an old London friend in 2017 that gave me cause to question my previous assumptions about Birmingham’s one-time protracted and painful postwar decline. As this friend – who, since we’d lost touch in the mid-1990s had made his fortune in Birmingham – understood it, Birmingham’s fortunes had in fact been in some way deliberately capped by postwar central government economic planning. If true, this might conceivably add an overlooked dimension to the already complex story of postwar Britain’s one time industrial and economic decline. When I discussed it with some members of the House of Lords, their reply was the same: ‘You really must tell people about this.’ But before proceeding any further, we will shortly read how the words ‘forgotten’ and ‘ignored’ have been applied to postwar Birmingham. In a talk to a Birmingham entrepreneur’s group in 2019, I suggested that the importing in previous centuries to Birmingham of (for example) materials produced by enslaved people was also forgotten – was 'something as a city we’ve got to look into’. Whilst the focus of these blog pieces is post world war two central government planning and Birmingham, where I have drawn upon wider historical contexts or places, I am deeply conscious that the role of enslavement and colonialism in relation to British cities evidently needs to be properly examined and debated. Birmingham’s slavery links uncovered (BBC - 2007) and Did Birmingham Profit? (BBC - 2014) may be helpful starting points to at least begin that process of educating ourselves and our children. The aforementioned Boulton & Watt’s business decisions and financing, for example, are mentioned in the latter. 3 Britain After Coronavirus: Birmingham And How We Recovered and Rebalanced ‘Last Time’ 2 Whatever the world’s post-pandemic economic outlook, by the 21st century Birmingham had significantly bounced back. Before broaching a matter as deeply painful as Birmingham’s former postwar decline, please allow me, as a native Midlander, to first give you a rough thumbnail sketch of how much Joe Chamberlain’s ‘Midland Metropolis’ has achieved in our day to reverse that mid-to-late twentieth century decline. When Birmingham celebrated its city centenary in 1989, the City Council’s ambitious plans to reverse the city’s then flat-lining fortunes were well under way. The National Exhibition Centre adjacent to Birmingham airport, opened in the previous decade. Its subsequent growth upended the received wisdom that major national events could not be held outside of London. And the completion in 1991 of the International Convention Centre - and the moving of the Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet Company, to Birmingham from London, the year before provided further powerful early signs of economic and cultural revival in the then struggling city centre. Regeneration around the city centre’s charming ‘Brindleyplace’ canal-side was also underway from 1993. In 1994, Simon Rattle received a knighthood in the later part of his long tenure at the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. 4 Britain After Coronavirus: Birmingham And How We Recovered and Rebalanced ‘Last Time’ Birmingham’s 1834 Town Hall (centre) in 2020 from Victoria Square; Alpha Tower and HSBC Building on Centenary Square (left); PwC Building on Chamberlain Square behind Town Hall (right). The West Midlands Metro tram stop at the Town Hall. (Photo: Julian Dee) Thirty years from the centenary, Birmingham’s city centre economy was booming. As outlined in a 2015 Centre for Cities report, thousands of knowledge intensive business services (KIBS) jobs were moving into Birmingham from London. Walk around the city centre today - and you will see cranes and gleaming office blocks and new shops popping up everywhere as billions of pounds pour in. During the 1960s and 1970s, uncompromising brutalist structures such as the former Central Library, landed like vast concrete motherships from dystopian space invasion movies. Many (but not all) Brummies felt alienated by them – believing them to have flattened, disconnected and jarred against entire areas of the city centre. But today’s developments are truly something to sing about: • On 5 May 2020, during lockdown, the stunning 49 storeys Octagon residential tower proposal was published. The concepts and video for the ‘first pure residential octagonal high rise building in the world’ also show some great views and maps of Birmingham landmarks such as Centenary Square and Chamberlain Square; • The former brutalist city library – widely regarded as a barrier between Centenary Square and Chamberlain Square – has now been replaced by the sleek curves and impressive-yet-human scale of the PwC Building at No.1 Chamberlain Square.